The rest of the day featured a mixture of technical, governance and legal panels. Personally, I enjoyed diving into the technical stuff. I really enjoyed listening to the mighty Steve Faulkner talking about ARIA.

For example, if ARIA defines a feature to say that something is a header, this will conflict with the HTML5 header algorithm.

So there’s an ARIA landmark role of banner that appears to align with the HTML5 header element. But if you look more closely at the specs, they’re actually defined in different ways. A banner is a region that contains the primary heading or web site title whereas a header is the header of a section. One is unique per document whereas the other can be used multiple times in the same document. To put it another way, banner is like an ID and header is like a class name.

Steve pointed to another false clash. HTML5 contains a value of search for [the type attribute of the input element. ARIA has a search landmark role. Sounds like a duplication, right? But the landmark role is typically applied to a form element, not an input element.

Alas, the HTML5 validator will throw an error (although it is using an experimental HTML5+ARIA schema). Ah, well.

Still, there’s no reason not to start using ARIA roles today: browsers, libraries and screenreaders already offer a good level of support and it’s only going to get better. If we start adding ARIA roles to our websites—and in our CMS themes—then if the HTML5 community stays true to its stated principal of paving the cowpaths, the pragmatic here-and-now solution should triumph.